"Can't anybody get that AC to work?" Detective Alejandro Rodriguez pleaded.
The place was one room. A bed against a wall, a kitchenette at the far end, and a desk in the middle. Mostly empty bookshelves lined a wall, a small TV and VCR taking up some of the space. The body was facedown near the front door. A young woman in a short cotton chemise with a floral motif. On the desk, the computer monitor still glowed, black background, white fluttery letters. Taped to the computer was a plastic card the size of a driver's license. Name, handle, and secret password: her Compu-Mate membership card.
"Rosemary Rosedahl," Rodriguez said. His face was lathered with sweat, his blue short-sleeve shirt blotched under both arms. "Twenty-seven. Flight attendant for Pan Am. Part-time student at FIU. Rents the place from a doctor. Looks after the main house while he's gone. He's in New England for the summer, like any sensible person."
Charlie Riggs knelt and gently lifted the woman's head, brushing back short, frosted blond hair. He gently touched the neck where bruises were visible. He opened the mouth and peered down the throat with a pocket light. "Apparently fractured larynx and hyoid cartilage. No signs of ligature. Pinpoint hemorrhages on the face. Death from manual strangulation."
I tiptoed around the body to the computer monitor. "Rodriguez," I said. "I think you better dust this keyboard for prints."
The detective moved close to the screen. "Huh? Oh, we saw that. What's the big deal? The decedent wrote it before she bought the farm."
"A woman didn't write that," I said.
"No, who did?"
"I don't know. Poetry isn't my strong suit."
Charlie joined me in front of the monitor. He read silently a moment, clucking his tongue. "Alfred Tennyson," he said.
"I'll bring him in," Rodriguez said.
"I am beginning to mourn," Charlie Riggs said, "for the death of the classical education." Then he read it aloud:
"'WEAKNESS TO BE WROTH WITH WEAKNESS! WOMAN'S PLEASURE, WOMAN'S PAIN NATURE MADE THEM BLINDER MOTIONS BOUNDED IN A SHALLOWER BRAIN: WOMAN IS THE LESSER MAN, AND ALL THY PASSIONS, MATCHED WITH MINE, ARE AS MOONLIGHT UNTO SUNLIGHT, AND AS WATER UNTO WINE'"
"Quite a chauvinistic little ditty," Charlie Riggs concluded.
"Wouldn't get a great review in Ms., if that's what you mean," I said. "What's it from?"
"'Locksley Hall,'" said Charlie Riggs, master of the esoteric. "A jilted lover's lament. I wonder if there's such a thing as a forensic poet. Maybe I should send this to Pamela Maxson."
"Do it," I said, staring at the screen, trying to picture the wacko who stole the poet's words and now taunted us.
Look for messages, Pam Maxson had said. Okay, here was one, loud and clear. A man who boasts of his unrestrained passions and belittles women. The lesser man? Shallower brain? I wished old Tennyson could bump heads with the current generation of the female of the species. They'd stomp him to death with their running shoes, then dash off to perform brain surgery or discover a new planet through mathematical magic. But no use getting angry at the poet. His words, another's actions. I turned back to the body. Charlie had examined the eyelids for hemorrhage, and now one ghastly eye remained open, staring at me in blind accusation. A fury grew within me, burned in my gut. I never knew Marsha Diamond or Mary Rosedahl, but I knew they didn't deserve to die young, die hard. I wanted the maniac who did it.
A police artist in my mind sketched him. Overweight with a bad haircut and no friends. Lives alone in a room with a hot plate and a bunch of poetry collections he underlines and misunderstands. Clothes that don't match, a diet of donuts and greasy fries from a corner diner. A guy who hears voices and talks to himself on the bus while others try not to stare. A wrathful, rejected, deranged guy who strangles a woman. Or maybe two. And lets us know why.
Now I would find out who. It wouldn't be that hard, I thought. I had the brainpower of Pam Maxson and Charlie Riggs on my side. So my mind composed a little lyric for the freak locked in his windowless room.
All thy wits, matched with mine,
Are as tinplate unto gold dust,
And as tears unto brine.
CHAPTER 9
Charlie Riggs dipped a hand into an old coffee can and came up with a half-dozen night crawlers. Juicy ones, brown and black, round and squirmy.
"If you were a bass, would you chomp one of these?" he asked.
"If I were a bass, I'd want to be a tarpon," I said.
Charlie grumbled something unintelligible and speared a fat worm with his hook. He swung his cane pole-no graphite rods and championship tackle for him-into the canal and waited. On the marshy bank, a great white heron peg-legged along, a full five feet tall on those matchstick legs.
Charlie's line drifted with the almost imperceptible current, the moon tugging the endless waters from the ocean to the straits to the bay to the great slough of the Everglades. "Can't eat the bass anymore," Charlie said. "Mercury poisoning."
I had seen the Journal headline: chemical threatens glades. Two inches of type, tops. A Florida panther dead, its liver laced with mercury. Nearby, a mess of bass floating belly up. I imagined an innocuous headline dated December 1, 1941: Japanese flotilla steams southeast.
In the whirl and buzz of today's world, the men and women stuck in traffic jams cannot see the fouled streams, the poisoned pastures, the sea creatures strangled in plastic nets. Between punching in and punching out, getting ahead and stashing away their IRA, they have no time to consider the invisible menace. Meanwhile, in well-lighted conference rooms, finely groomed men in charcoal suits coolly discuss their budgets for R amp;D, SG amp;A, and the profit ratio of malignant poisons that coat the vegetables and artificial hormones that lace the beef.
Their computer models tell them how many tankers will cruise the Gulf before one strikes a reef and the appropriate tonnage that will ooze into the precious estuaries. Mathematically, they can figure when the waters of the Everglades will become as deadly as a toxic dump, when the song of a million birds will be stilled. No problem. The boys in insurance gotcha covered. Five million primary for the basic risk, fifty million excess reinsured with Lloyd's to protect the company's net worth and their own pensions. The public-relations folks-experts at damage control-are ready to fax prepackaged news releases that explain the company's profound concern at this unanticipated and unfortunate incident.
Just that morning Charlie and I heard thunder roll in the distance to the west. Not from the sky, but from underground explosions set by an oil company searching for a fortune beneath the river of grass. At dawn we watched their trucks, obscenely white, roll along the old levee, seismic sensors protruding like the antennae of steel-jacketed insects. Exploratory only, the company says, for it has no drilling permit. Just wait. After lobbyists pay their nighttime visits, it will only be a matter of time. The drilling will start, and some dark lonely night, through human error or computer breakdown or metal fatigue, the black gunk will belch into the marshy hammocks and over the sawgrass and through the canals. The crude will pour into the aquifer that supplies our fresh water. A bad enough spill and Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami will go bone dry. The roaches will inherit the concrete shells of forsaken condos, which in the end might be what was intended all along.
"Itemize it for me," Charlie Riggs ordered, as if I were a fuzzy-cheeked intern.
We were sitting on the wooden dock behind his cabin on an Everglades canal. Charlie wore hiking boots and khaki shorts that were stained with fish guts or worse. I wore gray practice shorts and an old tear-away jersey, number fifty-eight, which the Dolphins somehow managed not to retire. In the glare of the late-afternoon sun, I tried to talk and pull the porcelain stopper on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch at the same time.